My book about the bass

I’ve been poking away at a few book projects for the last couple of years, working in them when I find the time and the motivation (both of which seem to come far too rarely these days!). I managed to put the finishing touches on one of them, Road Warrior Without an Expense Account, in May of 2008, and I’ve got two more that I’m continuing to work on.

The first new project is titled (you guessed it) My Car Caught Fire and Exploded, which is a collection of a few dozen crazy gig stories, fleshed out and rewritten at times, hopefully giving people a chuckle after the rather somber tone of Road Warrior Without an Expense Account. Believe it or not, I actually put the bulk of this together last June, but the editing process has just begun, and I probably won’t get another chance to hack away at it for quite some time.

The second new project is titled Contrabass Conversations, and it will be a sort of amalgamation of the various approaches, concepts, and ideas about the double bass that I’ve gleaned from doing all the interviews I’ve done for the podcast these past few years.

I started to realize back in 2007 that this oral history and pedagogical profiling I’ve been amassing through the podcast is, in fact, a set of data that I can use to look for commonality in approaches to the instrumeny and offer some broader conclusions to various topics of interest. What do I mean, exactly? Well, for example;

• string, bow, and bass preferences
• background traits of successful bassists
• advice on excerpts, auditions, school choice
• perspectives on a performing career

…and much, much more. I think that, through interviewing so many of the world’s leading figures on the bass, I have gained an interesting perspective on careers in the bass world, and I look forward to amalgamating this data into a coherent project. Again, this is a fairly long-range project that will take place over the next few years, but it’s what has been rattling around in my brain these past couple of years, and I think it will prove to be an interesting project.